It’s amazing how companies can sell a product by listing a feature that actually shortens the item’s useful life. For example, see the Scrub Daddy, a famous Shark Tank product. This round smiley sponge is useful for all kinds of cleaning, and the holes that form it’s face are advertised as finger grips and a utensil cleaner. In the time I’ve used the sponges, I’ve discovered that these features are pretty much useless. The mouth of the sponge isn’t a thorough way of cleaning utensils, and nobody holds a sponge like a bowling ball through the eye holes as designed. In fact, the holes punched in the sponge dramatically reduce its durability. Every time one of these have disintegrated, its started to tear between an eye and the mouth or the mouth and the edge. The inventors did a great job of surreptitiously planning this sponge’s obsolescence.